Acorn's Latest Arrival Packs a Punch

Cambridge, England, 2nd April 1996.

Acorn Risc Technologies (ART) is pleased to announce that at 11:12 on Tuesday 26th March 1996, the first prototype Risc PC StrongARM Processor Card was powered up.

ART is a division of Acorn Computer Group, leading developers and suppliers of innovative technology products and services.

This experimental card, using a first release of Advanced Risc Machine Ltd's StrongARM processor, managed to achieve an internal clock speed of 228MHz and produced a first benchmark of 147,000 Dhrystones.

Following testing and modification to the system software ART's engineers have managed to increase the performance to circa 290,000 Dhrystones. These figures should improve again upon receipt of production silicon from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The StrongARM card is running Acorn's RISC OS and supporting a number of applications such as a graphics rendering package and JPEG decompresser. ART is delighted to announce this first significant milestone and as a result of this confirm that it will be producing a cacheless StrongARM daughter upgrade card for the award-winning Risc PC for sale during Quarter 3 1996.

The StrongARM device has major implications for the key technologies that ART is developing and considerable performance improvements are possible in the areas of videophone, mobile communications devices and display terminals.

Using a conversion factor between kilo-Dhrystones and Dhrystone MIPs of 1.75 the following performance is given:

Test machine specification

Benchmarks

Processor	Core clock	Dhrystones	Dhrystone MIPs	Comparison
ARM 710	40 MHz	52,000	30	1
StrongARM	228 MHz	290,000	166	5.6

Background

Acorn focuses on the generation and renewal of intellectual property. Its designs and licences enable partners to bring new products to market faster and improve profitability.

The Acorn Computer Group includes: Acorn Online Media, Acorn Network Computers and Acorn Risc Technologies. Acorn also has a 43 percent share holding in Advanced RISC Machines (Holdings) Limited and has fifty percent ownership of Xemplar Education Ltd,a new joint venture company combining both Acorn and Apple's education businesses, which has been created to be the leading solutions provider to UK education.

The above is a Press release from Acorn Computers Limited, 2/4/96.